Random thoughts on the season and the day, sliding into a very odd elegy that was not written in a churchyard, further devolving into colloquial semantics and Burroughsian circumlocutions:

If spring is a time of starts and new beginnings then what is fall? Because there always seems to be more motion in fall. In fall things cut loose.

I just had the “what’s new” conversation with my neighbor Chad while I was moving the plants in for the winter, ahead of the first hard frost (not Robert). He’s left his girlfriend and is moving to California. Brandy is moving out next weekend to Soulard. So a month too late on the Chris and Vanessa schedule, the neighboring townhouse is free (they had talked about wanting to move in there). Chris… Vanessa… do you think there is room on your property for a school bus? It’s really cool, I promise! I was thinking about trying to rescue it next weekend, but I have nowhere to park it.

I hope we don’t get fascist neighbors. Are you cool? Do you want to move in? We can
have barbeques I promise. What changes will this bring? We’ll have to get rid of my spare car and hide Mary Beth’s in the garage with a tarp over it. Between the flat tires and the smashed windshield any realtor would want it towed away.

I spent the afternoon playing cards with my sisters and watching Fahrenheit 911. I watched Bowling for Columbine last night with Mary Beth so it has been a Michael
Moore weekend. He’s a little too maudlin at times and can alienate his audience to be sure. I don’t like his confrontation with Charlton at the end of the Columbine movie, leaving the little picture of the little girl – six years old – shot by the little six-year old boy is just over the top. Though it is important to note that Charlton does suggest in that scene, the then president of the NRA remember, that America has the gun violence it does because of the racial mixing. Ah magical racism, you’ve found a champion in the NRA. May your xenophobia spread to immigrants of every stripe, including the quasi puritans who spawned it. It’s just astounding that Michael got that confession on film.

I’m not anti gun so much as anti gun toting racist or reactive crazy person in general. Point of the film: Canada has more guns then we do and under 100 murders a year, we have 10,000 plus gun related murders a year. Why? Must not be the guns. We have a culture of fear that fosters consumption and violence. Media=marketing. Scared people buy dumb shit to make themselves feel better, they have no sense of humor because they are afraid all the time and instead of laughing or negotiating they react violently.

We intended to buy Fahrenheit, which has too many good points to list, but everywhere around here is currently sold out. Does that bode well? I hope so.

Sandy is very far along in her pregnancy and they keep moving the due date up. I imagine that the next time I see her it will be for the birth of my Nephew Henry. Can you feel the motion of things? I’ve started making a pile of things to sell on Ebay. I reactivated my account yesterday and am getting set up to make some money on all my junk. I fixed several pieces of broken furniture that I’d been meaning to get around to and ….I cleaned my room! Good boy. Mary Beth and I have spent much of the weekend cleaning the place. I even cycled the water and changed the filters in the fish tanks – no small task.

I am getting several GRE books from Karen to get my skills back up and running, we’re going to watch the final debate together I think on Wednesday. These books aren’t the most current, but I imagine they are current enough. No modern day Spinoza has reinvented geometry, and if they have I doubt I’ll be tested on it. She called to tell me Derrida had passed away. That’s a big leaf falling.

Derrida was one of the more important thinkers of the past fifty years. His influence is everywhere in our culture and has washed over every discipline. His was the loudest note of the postmodern song. His was the liminal voice, French Armenian Jew, that reminded us that the center is always in motion, that Heraclitus was more correct than Aristotle. My dear Aristotle, at the foot of that great classifying tree of being there is always a platypus and the platypus has only one enigmatic fortune cookie ticker tape inside that bill of his, “The center has always and already moved.”

In other words… If the world were like a Teeter Totter, with an immobile center upon which to pivot, then there would be upward swings and downward swings but never any forward motion. The Axis Mundi would govern all and be the measure of every truth. Ah high modernism, may all your dead white male soul searching smash its fucking mirror (and I like those boys, they were wrong, but I like um). This monkey brachiates, and as I move so too does my center, like a soccer ball that I kick in front of me, but never pick up.

After Derrida all your teachers who told you that there was one correct way to read a poem (and you either got it or didn’t based on your intelligence) were taken out back and shot. The glasses you are wearing are going to color what you see, they generate readings, and there ain’t nobody glasses free. Most folks got at least ten pairs on um at all times depending on what they might want to see in any given situation. You got your race, class and gender glasses on at all times, sort of like graduated bifocals. Then you might have some belief system or two your folks left you in their will. Perhaps you caught some nationalist zeal in flu season, or you have any number of quasi-historical hangovers going for you. Whatever it takes to belong. Old William Burroughs thought the whole language had caught the flu and it was way past time to operate, the word virus goes beyond glasses. We’ve got contacts you can’t take out in the language game, all of them tinted.

Sad truth sister is that you ain’t never going to get to that chewy center of the tootsie roll tootsie pop, no matter how many licks that wise old owl recommends. As stated earlier, your best is to follow Pynchon’s advice and “keep cool but care”.